History

In the early years of the 20th century, Baldwin purchased Cattell's interest in the journal, but was forced to sell the journal to Howard Warren in 1908 when scandal forced him out of his professorship at Johns Hopkins (where he had moved in 1903). Editorship of the journal fell to Baldwin's newly hired young colleague John B. Watson, who used the journal to advance his school of behaviorism. Psychological Review was eventually sold by Warren to the American Psychological Association, which has owned it ever since.

Mission

Psychological Review's mission has changed somewhat over the decades. Originally it was a journal of general psychology. With the rise of a wide variety of other psychology journals, it gradually came to focus on psychological theory.

According to its website,

Psychological Review publishes articles that make important theoretical contributions to any area of scientific psychology. Preference is given to papers that advance theory, but systematic evaluation of alternative theories in a given domain will also be considered for publication. Papers devoted to surveys of the literature, problems of method and design, or reports of empirical findings are not appropriate.[4]

It is one of psychology's most prestigious journals, according to the Journal Citation Reports having a 2015 impact factor of 7.581 which makes Psychological Review the #5 journal out of 129 in the category "Psychology, Multidisciplinary",[5]